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Not that common. A bigger plague (though somewhat later if my memory seves me right) was toolbars that was sneaked into every other application. The power cons

by tjoff 6y ago

Not that common. A bigger plague (though somewhat later if my memory seves me right) was toolbars that was sneaked into every other application. The power consumption alone of JavaScript easily shadows that. Pretty much no desktop computer in the world can go in lower sleep states because of javascript "idling" in the background. And a decent percentage of CPU cores are constantly pegged at 100%. Imagine the number of batteries that has prematurely died because of the stress of javascript - when all the user wanted was to read static text. Enabling ActiveX for your bank site is hardly the same. The real issue was running it on another OS than windows. Happily trade it for what we have today though.

JohnBooty 6y ago
I miss the old internet too. But think about the way things were trending, and the way they have trended. Online commerce, content delivery, and advertising are what, multiple trillions of dollars' worth of business? Once the web/internet became established and began trending toward ubiquity, companies were clearly always going to invest a lot into vying for our dollars and eyeballs. Without viable competition in the form of web standards, Javascript, and operating systems besides Windows it's almost certain that the evolving web would have leaned into ActiveX and/or Flash and made them essentially a requirement in much the way that Javascript is currently a requirement today. The timeline we're living in is not ideal, and I really dislike Javascript for a number of reasons, but it's also one of the primary reasons we're not living in an even worse timeline. There was always going to be something like Facebook. Now imagine Facebook... except powered by ActiveX instead of Javascript. Apologies if you just vomited as violently as I did while typing that. But when you talk about gladly trading Javascript for ActiveX, that's the sort of absolutely ruined world you're pining for.
- tjoff 6y ago
  But ActiveX didn't die because of competition, it died because it was terrible. The same fate happened to java applets. There was no real mainstream momentum for either. For sure things would have been different if Microsoft had really tried to exploit their monopoly. But they just left it there as if waiting for the competition to catch up and surpass. Flash could have been it, not that flash was much better but at least you could read text without it. It could be that anything would be made to suck. But it doesn't really follow that money means tracking to this extent and come with such poor user experience. With trillions of dollars on the line we make it so slow it is barely usable. Oftentimes there are many layers of popups and checkboxes just to get at the content. And somehow that is worth it? The incentives are insane. Tragedy of the commons is putting it kindly. Dark patterns are at an all time high. The techniques in the nineties used by criminals to trick you into running that attached executable in outlook express are now finessed by the largest corporations to trick you into allowing them to track you even more. On top of that the monoculture situation is pretty terrifying. I wouldn't bet on humanity not being able to make it worse but it is hard to accept the state that we are in.

by tjoff 6y ago

JohnBooty 6y ago

I miss the old internet too. But think about the way things were trending, and the way they have trended. Online commerce, content delivery, and advertising are what, multiple trillions of dollars' worth of business? Once the web/internet became established and began trending toward ubiquity, companies were clearly always going to invest a lot into vying for our dollars and eyeballs. Without viable competition in the form of web standards, Javascript, and operating systems besides Windows it's almost certain that the evolving web would have leaned into ActiveX and/or Flash and made them essentially a requirement in much the way that Javascript is currently a requirement today. The timeline we're living in is not ideal, and I really dislike Javascript for a number of reasons, but it's also one of the primary reasons we're not living in an even worse timeline. There was always going to be something like Facebook. Now imagine Facebook... except powered by ActiveX instead of Javascript. Apologies if you just vomited as violently as I did while typing that. But when you talk about gladly trading Javascript for ActiveX, that's the sort of absolutely ruined world you're pining for.

tjoff 6y ago
But ActiveX didn't die because of competition, it died because it was terrible. The same fate happened to java applets. There was no real mainstream momentum for either. For sure things would have been different if Microsoft had really tried to exploit their monopoly. But they just left it there as if waiting for the competition to catch up and surpass. Flash could have been it, not that flash was much better but at least you could read text without it. It could be that anything would be made to suck. But it doesn't really follow that money means tracking to this extent and come with such poor user experience. With trillions of dollars on the line we make it so slow it is barely usable. Oftentimes there are many layers of popups and checkboxes just to get at the content. And somehow that is worth it? The incentives are insane. Tragedy of the commons is putting it kindly. Dark patterns are at an all time high. The techniques in the nineties used by criminals to trick you into running that attached executable in outlook express are now finessed by the largest corporations to trick you into allowing them to track you even more. On top of that the monoculture situation is pretty terrifying. I wouldn't bet on humanity not being able to make it worse but it is hard to accept the state that we are in.